The Silent Law: A Critical Legal Studies Portrait of Neglected Justice in the Crime of Corruption in Indonesian Judicial Practice

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-519-5_16How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Law; Justice; Corruption; Critical Legal Studies; Inequality

Abstract

The handling of corruption cases in Indonesia often presents a paradox between the rhetoric of law enforcement and the reality of repeated injustice. In many cases, the law appears silent when dealing with perpetrators from the elite, while being harsh and repressive towards lower-class perpetrators. This phenomenon indicates the existence of legal silence in the judicial process. Through the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) approach, this article aims to critique the legal ideology that works silently in shaping power relations, and to reveal how seemingly neutral laws actually become tools for legitimising injustice. This study uses a normative legal research method with a conceptual approach. The results of this study show that the silence of the law is not the absence of a voice, but rather a strategy of silencing. In the context of corruption, the law has consciously or unconsciously chosen not to address the root causes of social inequality. There are cases where the losses incurred by the state are significant, yet the criminal penalties imposed in court rulings tend to be lenient, and even at the Supreme Court level, cases are often dismissed or acquitted. The handling of corruption-related criminal cases in Indonesia is still far from achieving substantive justice. The law often seems silent in the face of the injustice experienced by the community, due to the influence of bribery, politics and power. Through a critical analytical lens, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) offers an approach that better addresses the substantive justice sought by society.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Darius Antonius Kian
AU  - Supanto Supanto
AU  - Sapto Hermawan
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/29
TI  - The Silent Law: A Critical Legal Studies Portrait of Neglected Justice in the Crime of Corruption in Indonesian Judicial Practice
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Law, Economics & good Governance (ICLAW 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 206
EP  - 212
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-519-5_16
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-519-5_16
ID  - Kian2025
ER  -